William Case wrote:
... I have
just read the help manual one more time. I got no elucidation; I do get
frustration.
Here are a set of questions that, if answered, might help me.
What am I doing? ...
Your frustration is understandable. It's not an easy concept to describe
in words. Once you use it successfully, it gets a lot clearer. Let me
try to walk through an example--hopefully this isn't too basic.
First, you're confusing document templates and styles. A speech is a
kind of document; it's a larger unit of formatting. Styles work at the
level of individual paragraphs. A document may have many paragraphs with
many different styles. E.g. a speech may have two different kinds of
paragraph: headings and running text. Let's walk through creating a speech.
First, you start by typing a header:
Introduction
Now, you want your headers to stand out, so you select it and make it
bold and a different font, e.g. Arial, and you switch back to normal
text before going on.
Now you type some text, several paragraphs, in the Default style, and
you're ready for another header:
My Theory
To be consistent, you again select it and make it Arial+bold.
And so on until you finish your speech.
Now, all your headings look the same. But suppose you want to change the
heading's font from Arial to Tahoma. You have to go back and select each
one and change the font. Wouldn't it be nice if all the formatting
properties (font, bold, italic, etc) for the headings were connected in
one place, so that if you changed something in that one place, all the
headings would see the change? Rather than making each heading paragraph
Arial+bold, you would simply mark the paragraph as a heading, and then
it would get whatever formatting was defined for headings. If the
formatting packet for headings says the font should be Arial, then all
the paragraphs marked as headings have the Arial font instead of the
default. If the formatting packet says Tahoma, then all the heading
paragraphs use the Tahoma font. All the formatting for a distinct
component of the document would be collected and defined in one place.
That's all a style is: a packet of formatting that has a name. Any
paragraph tagged with that style name automatically gets whatever format
settings are contained in the style packet with the same name.
We didn't use styles to write this speech--or did we? We didn't tag any
paragraphs with a style, but unless you specifically change the style,
whatever you type is tagged with the style named "Default". So, every
paragraph in the speech actually has the Default style, even the
headings. The headings look different because the manual formatting we
did (Arial+bold) overrides what the Default style setting says.
You can see this if you change the style packet named "Default" to use
say, 14-point-size text instead of the default 12 point. Now every
paragraph tagged with the "Default" style tag automatically changes to
14-point: no selecting, clicking or manual changes required. The
headings change as well, because they were never changed from the
Default style tag.
Things can be tricky when you mix manual settings along with styles,
because the manual formatting overrides whatever the style setting says.
I need to quit here. Let me know if this helps or not.
<Joe
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